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It’s that time! Time for you to tell us what you’re reading! EllenM: After a long period of being totally bored by and sick of most historical romance, I’m suddenly finding myself enjoying it again! Just finished A Scandalous Kind of Duke by Mia Vincy ( A | BN | K | AB ) which was delightfully full of pining and longing. I also may have stayed up way too late last night binging the first couple volumes of the manga series My Boss’s Kitten which is fairly fluffy and ridiculous fun if you are not immediately squicked out by the boss/employee thing. The series description calls the male MC “sadistic” which seems misleading as from what I can tell he’s mostly just (consensually) really horny, haha. Its sexy and silly fun but I probably wouldn’t pay money for it if it was not on comixology unlimited. Susan: I’m taking a leaf out of everyone else’s book and listening to the audiobook of All Systems Red. ( A | BN | K | AB ) Murderbot remains my favourite character; its arc across the series is that it doesn’t want to be more human, it has social anxiety and all of these tv shows to watch, and is thus the most relatable character of all. Sarah: The narrator is so good too. A | BN | K | ABMaya: Twinsies, I’m also doing a Murderbot relisten! Along with Murderbot, I recently heard an old interview of Akwaeke Emezi and now I’m kinda obsessed with their writing, so I’m listening to You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty. Shana: CANNOT wait to hear what you think, Maya. Kiki: My friend sent me A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall for Christmas and I’m so, so, so excited to read it once I finish my other behemoths. Sneezy: The English translation for season 2 of I Raised a Black Dragon is out on Manta and I’M SO HAPPY!!! A | BNThe newest chapter kicked in strong with Noa back in her own body, and Leonard low key loosing his shit at how attractive she is. His 19th century ass cannot with her 21st century shorts and now her running around in a chemise. Tara: I’m reading The Fixer by Lee Winter, ( A | BN | K ) which is the first part of a duology. I’ve been excited about this one for a while because she’s one of my favourite authors and she’s showing the romance of a villain who deeply fucked over one of my favourite characters ever. I’m VERY curious to see how this character gets redeemed. Elyse: I stayed up all night reading A Long Time Coming by Meghan Quinn. It’s a super cute, sexy, funny friends to lovers. My only issue is the hero is names Breaker. Breaker. I kept thinking Beaker. What are you reading? Tell us in the comments below! View the full article

There is something grizzled, world-weary, and wise about Charlie Cole (Natasha Lyonne), the protagonist of Poker Face, Peacock’s new ten-episode detective series developed by Lyonne and writer-director Rian Johnson. She is a compact amalgam of a whole TV guide’s worth of ultra-cool, unpretentious detective characters. Both odd and slick, kooky and badass, spacy and focused, she has the canny, street-smart aura and vaguely Brooklyn dialect of Frank Columbo, the laconic, chill sensibilities and trailer-living habits of Jim Rockford, and the outwardly-rumpled appearance and insouciant supermarket-shopping patterns of Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski. Like all those guys, Charlie lives life on her own terms. She wants to enjoy it, but isn’t interested in going to grand lengths to do so. She works as a cocktail waitress on a Las Vegas casino floor, drinks beer in a lawn chair in her desert backyard before her shifts, and looks after her motley friends and neighbors with a wry but caring air. In the first episode, a character offers her a job that could make her rich. “I’ve been rich,” she says, disinterested. “It’s easier than being poor, harder than doing just fine.” She has a unique talent—a flawless ability to tell when someone is lying—and this has brought her great success and also great reckoning. Charlie is a former poker champion, blackballed from tournaments after rumors spread about how she was able to win so consistently. But she doesn’t mind where she has ended up. She works, she rests. It’s a simple life and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when a good friend and fellow casino employee named Natalie (Dascha Polanco) winds up dead, she is moved to investigate. She cares deeply about her friend and knows in her gut that something is off about the circumstances of her death. To be clear, through investigating, Charlie doesn’t find herself or find meaning or discover potential or something like that. She doesn’t need to do these things; she is more than content with her life. She’s just good at reading people and she wants to do right by her friend. But when she does solve things, her life becomes a bit complicated. And she hops into her Plymouth Barracuda and hits the road. Poker Face is an hour-long, case-of-the-week mystery series, so each town Charlie visits leads to a new case, new characters. She sort of can’t help look into things that seem to be suspicious; she wants to lend a hand to those around her, but she’s also scratching an itch. If someone lies to her, she knows it, and she has to figure out why. The episodes are laced together by the simple act of pursuit; Charlie’s on the run, kinda—hunted by a wealthy family’s in-house fixer, Cliff Legrande (a wonderfully menacing Benjamin Bratt). Like Dr. Richard Kimble in the show The Fugitive, just as much as we want her to stick around the watering holes where she makes friends and solves crimes, we also know she’s gotta get the hell out before Cliff catches up to her. The gambit of Poker Face is simple and tight, but the show itself is flamboyantly fun. This is partially because resurrects Golden Age detective TV tropes. Notably, Poker Face is, in Philip MacDonald’s words, a “howcatchem” (as opposed to “whodunnit”), a variety of mystery plot in which the audience sees the murder and knows who the killer is, and then watches the detective figure it all out. Although “howcatchem” plots track back to at least the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, they most prominently featured in episodes of Columbo, which were almost mini-movies that made its villains the episode’s protagonists, and as such, attracted a host of distinguished guest-stars. The same is true for Poker Face; the first episode revolves around a character played Adrien Brody, while later episodes feature performances from Hong Chau, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lil Rey Howery, and Rob Perlman, Stephanie Hsu, Tim Blake Nelson, Nick Nolte, Ellen Barkin, Megan Suri, Judith Light, Jameela Jamil, Tim Meadows, Clea DuVall, Chloë Sevigny, and Brandon Micheal Hall. Johnson says he was inspired by TV shows in this mold: “hourlong, star-driven, case-of-the-week shows,” ones with “the anchoring presence of a charismatic lead and a different set of guest stars and, in many cases, a totally different location, every single week.” He cites “Quantum Leap,” “The A-Team,” “Highway to Heaven” and even “The Incredible Hulk.” This endeavor proves a neat counterweight to Johnson’s recent forays into whodunnits, the star-studded Knives Out and its sequel, Glass Onion, which are nostalgic case studies of the traditional mystery. The desire to emulate one’s favorite entertainment from a past era isn’t enough to elevate a project, though; in fact, new stories that owe too much to their predecessors easily end up encumbered by them, or paling in comparison to them. But Poker Face doesn’t suffer this fate, mostly due to the distinct charms of Natasha Lyonne, whose mildly-wackadoo, somewhat rough-edged, occasionally-wisecracking Charlie feels more like an extension of Lyonne’s own onscreen persona (hello Russian Doll) rather than a knockoff of a beloved TV PI. Also, obviously, Lyonne is woman, and we don’t get spaced-out, oddball lady detectives as much as we deserve to, so she can’t help but feel novel. (Interestingly, Charlie, with her traditionally-masculine name, is also perhaps doubly-gendered; on paper, she would appear to be exactly the kind of male PI we’ve long watched on TV, but she seems to identify as a woman.) But Lyonne is also a very earnest performer; crucial to a character who can read bluffs and deceit in others, she is unfailingly sincere. Even amid the (slight shenanigans), she is genuine and true. A friend says that if she had been born in another time, she might have been a knight. The series is set in the present-day, but, although characters use smart phones and read clickbait, it stays distinctly analog, cultivating a righteously 70s-patina. The orangey desert backdrop and brown dive bar wall-paneling do much for this texture, but the real crux of this vibe is how personal it is. Charlie is described as a “human lie detector.” She has a skill that supersedes the kind of forensic investigating or “hacking” that became so common around millennium-era procedurals. (AI doesn’t have anything on Charlie… yet.) It’s a show about the tangible… or rather, making the intangible tangible. Charlie drifts from place to place, making connections with people in communities, changing things (a little bit) for the better. Poker Face is streaming on Peacock. The first four episodes aired on January 26th, 2023. The remaining six will stream weekly on Thursdays. View the full article

There’s a crowd at the bar when I get inside, but I hang back, alone, and watch. There’s a bucket swinging in my hand, rusted tin, filled with pinkish water, and my hands are dyed red. They match the walls of The Ruby, though it’s so packed tonight, you can barely see the diamond wallpaper through the crowd. A constant hum of people talking over each other fills the room, pierced by a loud laugh here and there, like the church organ shrieking over the choir. A few people stare at me – I don’t know if it’s the bucket or just knowing who I am, but they don’t say anything. They look away, quick, back at a friend, or the stage, where the band plays It’s No Sin, the female impersonator’s voice struggling to be heard. People are dancing anyway, hands clasped, bodies close, men with men, women with women, some men with women, even. I haven’t seen a mixed gay bar since the war, when women needed men to escort them in. All colors of people, too. Elsie has really gotten word out that The Ruby is the most welcoming queer bar in San Francisco. Except maybe for me. News has trickled out about me, too – the gay PI with the office above the Ruby – but with it so has my past, and no one at a gay bar wants to get too close to a cop, even if he was kicked off the force for being caught in one. Especially not when he’s holding a bucket of what looks like blood. I push my way through the people who won’t look at me, trying to be delicate, making sure the bucket doesn’t spill, and make my way to the bar. Gene is pouring out drinks with steady hands that were trained for the scalpel before someone sent photos of him and a beaux to his medical school. He looks gorgeous in the light. He glows. I know I should probably try talking to him more. But our kiss was months ago, and I was broken and bloody and glad to be alive. Since then, whenever I’ve gotten up the nerve to talk to him, he’s smiled and laughed, same as he has with any other customer. He looks down at the bucket I’m holding, and frowns. “Need the sink?” he asks. “If that’s all right. I’m afraid I’ll spill it if I try to bring it upstairs.” He moves to the left, making space for me, and I squeeze in next to him. Our shoulders touch and for a moment I think of asking him to dance, what that would be like, being out on the floor with him, shoulder to shoulder, arms around his waist. Like I belonged, I think. Like I was home. I pour the red water out, and it sloshes loudly into the sink. “That’s not blood, is it?” a patron asks, watching. He’s drunk enough to talk to me. “Paint,” I say. “Someone wrote some not-nice things on the building a few weeks back. No one else had time yet, so I washed it off.” “Aren’t you supposed to be a detective?” I shrug, not sure how to answer. The motion tilts the bucket a little harder and the last of the red water splashes back on me, hitting me in the face. The patron laughs as Gene hands me a towel. “He is a detective,” Gene says, as I wipe my face off, hiding my smile. I hand the towel back to him. “Thanks,” I say, and go to wash my hands off, too. I scrub, and the paint won’t shift. My hands stay stained. “Want a drink?” Gene asks. “No,” I say. “Thanks.” I stand next to him a moment longer until he reaches past me to get a bottle and I realize I’m in the way. I leave the bucket under the sink where it belongs and retreat to an empty table away from the bar. Gene shoots me a look when I get there, but I can’t read it – maybe he’s confused about my not wanting a drink. I try not to order drinks. Elsie said they’d be on the house, but considering I’m not bringing in much money, like she hoped I would, I’d rather not drain her cash and her liquor. I’m supposed to be paying her a percentage of my earning from cases, but cases aren’t exactly pouring in. As a cop, they used to find me, now… I’m not sure how to get them. I wait in my office most nights, and sometimes someone will walk in, but most nights it’s empty, so I come down here, and stand to the side, hoping that’ll drum up business somehow. Tonight I at least got to make myself useful when one of the cocktail waitresses mentioned the graffiti. At least I cleaned up something. Elsie sits down next to me. “Oh, will you just ask him out already?” she says, lighting a cigarette. She’s in a blue suit turned nearly purple from all the red light bouncing off the walls. Large ruby earrings sparkle from the shadows of her bob. “What do you mean?” “I mean it’s been months of you two making baby eyes at each other and nothing happening. If you don’t do something soon, he’s going to assume you’re not interested in him. It’s nearly October already, Andy, get to it if you want to ring in ‘53 with him.” “I don’t…” I shake my head and look back at him. He’s laughing at something a guy at the bar said. Maybe I’ve been making eyes at him, but has he really been making eyes at me, or just staring at my stare? “How would I even do that?” “What?” Elsie blows out a smoke ring. “What do you mean?” “I mean…” I don’t know what I mean. Two women, one in a suit, dance past us. She sighs. “You just go up to him and ask him if he wants to get a drink.” “He works at a bar.” “Somewhere else,” Elsie shrugs. “But-” “Elsie, Stan is trying to sneak another number into his set.” I look up at Lee, the showgirl who’s interrupted us, and check for lipstick; deep red tonight. She’s in a yellow halterneck dress that sets off her dark brown skin, and a black wig that’s tied back in a bun with a large yellow flower. She sees me staring, and winks. I’ve know a lot of the show girls and boys in passing, but Lee has been the closest to welcoming. She told me flat out that when she’s got the lipstick on, to call her miss, and when it comes off, to call him sir, and if I did that, we’d be pals. Easy enough to check. I don’t want to mess it up and have the friendliest face in the hallway, maybe the whole city, stop talking to me. “Oy vay,” Elsie says, looking at the stage, where Stan, the female impersonator, is readying the mic for another number. “I’ll take care of it.” “Sorry Andy,” Lee says, “didn’t mean to steal her away.” “It’s fine,” I say, as Elsie stands. “You have a fella waiting in your office, by the way. Nice shoulders.” “Sad or angry?” I ask. Those are the two types I get. Sad men, wondering if their boyfriends are cheating on them, and angry men, convinced their boyfriends are cheating on them. Cheap work, tailing men meeting other men, or going home to the wives they haven’t told anyone about, but I can’t be picky. I’m new at this, and I need to bring in whatever I can. “Not sure,” Lee shakes her head. “I think he came up through the garage though.” The ground floor under the club is a garage with an entrance in the alley. There’s parking down there; my car, Elsie’s, some others – but with it being out of the way and a bouncer in the stairwell keeping an eye out for the cops, it’s an easy way up to my office without even setting foot in the club. “Better get to work, then,” Elsie says, walking away, “and ask him out.” She glances meaningfully over at Gene. “Ask who out?” Lee asks, grinning at me. “You finally find a boy you like, Andy? It better not be Stan.” “No,” I say quickly. “It’s… something else. Thanks, Lee. Sorry I won’t get to hear you sing. I’ll try to get down before your set is over.” “You’ll hear me through the floorboards, honey,” she says, walking after Elsie, her hips swaying. Gene’s eyes flicker to mine for a moment as I pass the bar, or maybe I imagine it, and he’s just staring at a drink at he pours it. I can talk to him later. Leaving a client waiting means they have time to reconsider and walk out. Elsie hasn’t set an expiration date on this little experiment of having an in-house detective, but I must seem like a bad idea by now. I bring in enough to feed myself, sure, but her percentage is much lower than the value of renting me the space, and we both know it. How long before she decides my office and apartment were better before, as storerooms for booze? I have to shove through the crowds, and by the time I get halfway upstairs to my office, I can hear Lee singing How High the Moon. The floor above the club is just a hallway from one elevator to stairs, dark purple walls and lined with doors, most of them open. The two closest to the elevator are my office and apartment, respectively, but the other four are the dressing rooms, doors always thrown open, the hallway bustling with performers and musicians and sometimes waitresses here on break, or fans coming to leave flowers for their favorite performers. People laugh and talk as loudly as downstairs as they paint on make-up or fake mustaches, zip up dresses, button vests. At first, the chaos worried me, but it actually feels like home, the same sort of clamor as working at the police station, only now I’m not looking over my shoulder to see if they’re realizing the truth about me. Right now, the hall is filled with white feathers slowly floating down through the air and scattered on the floor like flower petals after a thunderstorm. I glance into one of the dressing rooms and see Walter trying to squeeze into a white dress that’s covered in feathers. Sarah, already in a full tuxedo, is trying to pull up the zipper for him, but it’s not going, and he hops up and down, hoping to make it fit, shedding feathers as he does. “It fit last week,” he says. “You got fat this week.” In the next room, two female impersonators are peeling off their makeup, cackling at a joke I didn’t hear. A male impersonator is leaning against the wall, smoking. When I nod, she nods back, which is something. They never nodded back the first few months I was here. Even if they’re coming to terms with my old life, they don’t love that I’m suddenly living and working next door. Clients don’t love it, either. Even with a covert way up here, the way people gossip, you need to be careful. But I’m the only queer detective in town, so some of them still risk it. Even when I’m not here, someone always tells me if a client shows up. It’s still uncommon enough it’s noteworthy. Not that the cases are. I’d thought I could do something here, maybe make up for who I was. But all I do is follow people, tell people who love them their secrets. I’m not helping out the way I wanted. No one even trusts me enough to ask me when they’re in real trouble. Why would they? Elsie had the door redone when I moved in, Amethyst Investigations stenciled in dark purple. I don’t love the name, but I get why she chose it – being affiliated with the Ruby, being another of Elsie’s gems – it means I’m trustworthy, like the Ruby is. Most welcoming gay club in San Francisco, most welcoming gay PI, too. In theory anyway. Certainly not everyone is buying it though, or I’d have more business. I wonder who’s desperate or angry enough to come see me tonight. There’s a man sitting in the chair that faces my desk. His back is to me, but I can see he’s blonde, broad shouldered, tall. I close the door with a click and he turns around. Oh. The recognition hits like an anchor that’s dropped too fast, crashing into the seabed, into both of us, sand flying up, fish fleeing, a heavy thud and a scar on the ocean floor. He looks just as shocked as I feel. Well, at least that’s two of us. “I didn’t realize it would be you,” he says, almost apologetically. He stands up. “I can go. I mean, I should go.” I think about letting him. He can drift out the door like smoke and I can go back to thinking of him as a sour memory. But I can’t be turning down clients. And… I want to know. What happened. From THE BELL IN THE FOG by Lev AC Rosen. Copyright ©2023 by Lev AC Rosen. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Forge Books. All rights reserved. View the full article

Found by the Lake Monster Found by the Lake Monster by Lillian Lark is $1.49 at Amazon and $2.99 elsewhere. I’m so curious about this Monstrous Matches series and the covers are really wonderful. However, I believe this one is a novella and is listed 1.5 in the series. A lake monster in heat, a lost human in the woods, and the lie that gets her stuffed… Getting lost in the woods was not the adventure Amy had in mind when she jumped at the chance to search for the local lake monster. She just wanted to liven up her steady but boring life, not wonder if every shadow on the ground is a snake and worry that no one will ever find her. Luckily, someone does find her. Unexpectedly, that person isn’t human. Wildly, he seems to think that she’s his date. Adrian faces what could be his last heat. As his temperature rises and his biological clock ticks, his only hope is that the witch being sent by a famous matchmaker will be as compatible as he dreams. Can he convince his date to not only provide relief during his heat but also carry his eggs? Found by the Lake Monster takes place in the same world as Stalked by the Kraken and includes breeding, knotting, and oviposition. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Something True Something True by Karelia Stetz-Waters is $1.99! Stetz-Waters newer books have been favorably reviewed and mentioned on the site. This is an older title and the description notes some pretty serious themes. Tate Grafton has a tough exterior, but underneath she’s kind, caring, and fiercely loyal. That’s why she first started working at Out in Portland Coffee-it was her way of repaying the shop’s owner for taking her in as a homeless teenager. Nine years later, the coffee shop is floundering and Tate feels like she’s letting life pass her by . . . until she shares an unforgettable night with a beautiful stranger. When the mysterious woman disappears the next morning, Tate doesn’t even know her name. Laura Enfield was supposed to be in Portland for only a few days-just long enough to oversee a simple business deal before joining her conservative father on his political campaign. But when the closeted Laura romances an employee of the coffee shop her company is shutting down, things get suddenly complicated. Now, the lies she’s told for years are beginning to unravel, and her biggest secret is about to be exposed. Laura can’t stop thinking about the barista with the soulful eyes, but after a lifetime of deception, can she finally embrace something true? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Color of Love The Color of Love by Sandra Kitt is $1.99! This contemporary romance came out in 1995. Kitt’s latest book was released last February and had a Buzzfeed write-up on it. Did you pick it up? Acclaimed for her moving depictions of interracial love, bestselling author Sandra Kitt delivers a passionate and provocative tale of modern romance. An artist trapped in an unfulfilling relationship, Leah Downey wants more out of life. But she plays it safe, never venturing too far from her comfort zone . . . not since the night she was mugged at knifepoint. Beginning a relationship with a perfect stranger is completely out of character for Leah. But something about Jason Horn strikes a chord deep within her. They couldn’t be more different. Jason is white, a streetwise New York cop haunted by his own demons. He’s stunned by his instant attraction to this vibrant black woman who arouses both desire and his fiercest protective instincts. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Wolf in the Whale The Wolf in the Whale by Jordanna Max Brodsky is 99c! This was a highly anticipated release on the site, given Sarah’s enjoyment of Brodsky’s books in the past. However, there is a very graphic rape scene in the book, which put a lot of us off. If you want more details about this, I highly recommend looking through Goodreads reviews. The heroic journey of an Inuit shaman and a Viking warrior in an epic tale of survival, love, and clashing gods in the frozen Arctic of 1000 AD. Born with the soul of a hunter and the language of the gods, Omat is destined to become a shaman like her grandfather. To protect her people, she invokes the spirits of the sky, the sea, and the air. But the gods have stopped listening, the seals won’t come, and Omat’s family is starving. Desperate to save them, Omat journeys through the icy wastes, fighting for survival with every step. When she meets a Viking warrior and his strange new gods, together they set in motion a conflict that could shatter her world…or save it. The Wolf in the Whale is a powerful tale of magic, discovery and adventure, featuring an unforgettable narrator ready to confront the gods themselves. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

Still from Anya Zalevskaya’s Posle priliva (2020). Courtesy of the director. In the fall of 2019 I was newly living in the Midwest. In my free time, I’d take long, aimless walks, trying to tune to the flat cold of the place. On one such walk I got a call from my friend Anya Zalevskaya; she was in Odesa, she said, working on a film, a documentary about the Ukrainian (but also Romanian, Jewish, and Soviet) director Kira Muratova. When Anya called, it was almost midnight in Odesa. She was sitting on a bench by the Black Sea; I could hear the waves, the inhale of her cigarette. What film of Muratova’s should I watch first? I asked her. Ah, she said, The Asthenic Syndrome, for sure. 1990’s The Asthenic Syndrome takes us to Odesa, too, but this is an Odesa at the fraying edge of a Soviet time-space where, significantly, we never see the sea. The film is shot in places that suggest a borderland, an edge, a wobble: construction sites, mirrors, photographs, headstones, film screenings, cemeteries, a dog pound, a hospital ward, a soft-porn shoot. This in-between sense is temporal, as well: Muratova notes that she “had the great fortune of working in a period between the dominance of ideology and the dominance of the market, a period of suspension, a temporary paradise.” As with the asthenic syndrome itself (a state between sleeping and waking), the film is a realization of inbetweenness, an assembly of frictions and crossover states we feel through form: through Muratova’s use of juxtaposition; through her uncanny overpatterning of echoes and coincidences; through the shifts of register between documentary and opera. The film doesn’t proceed so much as weave itself in front of us, in a dazzling ivy pattern of zones and occurrences. You could call it late-Soviet baroque realism. The film is really two films. The first, in black and white, opens out into a funeral. It’s for the husband of Natasha, we learn—a middle-aged woman possessed, in the ensuing scenes, to the very end of herself with grief. Because grief invents the road it travels, Natasha—like her audience—does not herself know what she will do next. With terrifying speed, she quits her job as a doctor, insulting coworkers in the process; takes a drunk home, tells him to strip, beds him; shoves and insults passersby. All this is captured in the camera’s eye, however, with a disinterested dignity. And then, abrupt as Natasha’s shoving, the first film breaks into the second (I’ll leave you to see the how and the why—it’s great). At the epicenter of the second film is the exhausted Nikolai, a schoolteacher who nods off in moments of emotional intensity. Occurrences flare up around Nikolai like religious antimiracles—a carp torn apart by female fingers as “Chiquita” plays, a high school boy imitating a game show host, the agonizing panorama of the dog pound. This is the social and inner world in abjection, yes: but because abjection is possible, the film seems to say, so is human dignity. The question of dignity binds the viewer to the film’s concern: what is the human when it is shorn of category, of psychology, of system? What are we when we are together? What are we when we are alone? In the rare interviews she gave, Muratova often mentioned her philosophy of film: what she called dekorativnost’ (ornamentedness) and sherokhovatost’ (roughness). (Thanks to Mikhail Iampolski’s 2021 talk “A World without Reality” for many of the Muratova quotes here.) The viewer, Muratova thought, should encounter the film’s reality as an ornament, a woven carpet, a fabric: completely antisymbolic, and thus anti-ideological; completely antipsychological, and thus antistereotypical. Reality itself, she argued, can only be looked at, admired—not interpreted, understood, or possessed. Reality doesn’t “mean,” it is. As when, in an interview, Muratova is asked: “What do the horses in your films symbolize?” To which she replies: “What do the people symbolize?” There’s no neat ending possible here in good faith; rhetoric and delicacy are insults to the present situation, and if the Black Sea that I heard over the phone in 2019—unsymbolic itself—still crashes and breaks as it always has, it sounds differently now in the human ear. Anya’s remarkable short film, Posle priliva (After the Tide, available with English subtitles here) is a pursuit of reality in Muratova’s footsteps that trusts in the uses of intuition, coincidence, error, and attention. Like Muratova, Anya immerses herself in the reality the film pursues—in this case, Odesa in 2019—and in the people, encounters, scenes, and things that this reality happens to make available in a given moment. She gives herself over to what will disclose itself; she’s not so much seeking something as she is listening, with intuition’s ear, for the inevitable that is the soul of chance. Neither of their films are ever “random,” and therein lies their art. Posle priliva came out in 2020. In 2023, it has become an elegy to a time and place, a specter and a document of what was. Not unlike The Asthenic Syndrome, which has come to mark a period (late perestroika, pre-collapse) that now haunts in its total irrecoverability. Still from Anya Zalevskaya’s Posle priliva (2020). Courtesy of the director. Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator. Their poems “Brezhnev” and “Oracle at Dog” appear in our new Winter issue, no. 242. View the full article

“We take care of our own. The rest can fend for themselves.” “It just will not do to let people see the maggots that crawl inside you.” Camilla Bruce’s All The Blood We Share (2023) is a unique mix of horror, true crime, western and historical novel. Based on the real life story of the Bloody Benders, a family of serial killers who operated in Labette County, Kansas from May 1871 to December 1872, Bruce draws on the scanty recorded history and the larger than life folk legends that emerged once the family’s crimes were discovered to create a powerful and disturbing work of fiction. All The Blood We Share vividly evokes 19th century prairie life, and offers a frightening but nuanced portrayal of the Benders, particularly focusing on the female members of the family. Along with her previous novels, the dark fantasy You Let Me In (2020) and historical horror Triflers Need Not Apply (2021), All The Blood We Share confirms Bruce as an exciting and unique voice in both horror and historical fiction. All The Blood We Share opens with daughter Kate and mother Elvira’s arrival in Labette County in 1871, on the run from their past and joining father William and Kate’s stepbrother John, who went on ahead to build a house for the whole Bender family, where they could set up an inn to serve travellers to the small town of Cherryvale. The Benders’ plan is to lay low and build a new life for themselves, far away from the clutches of the law after their crimes in New York and Pennsylvania have been discovered. But Kate believes she is destined for the stage, and starts setting herself up as a medium, impressing the local spiritualist circle and drawing more attention to herself and the family than Elvira is comfortable with. The loathing, misanthropy and bloodlust that runs in the Bender family line soon overflows, and the Benders discover that their murderous proclivities can earn them more by preying on unwary travellers instead of just serving them. The murders provide the family with an outlet, but it’s not long before the townsfolk of Cherryvale begin to notice the number of corpses turning up and people going missing, and soon the Benders fall again under suspicion. As the corpses pile up under the Bender estate, Kate and Elvira must both decide what lengths they will go to in order to protect their family and themselves. The novel is told through the perspectives of Kate and Elvira Bender, plus Hanson, a young boy who is the Benders’ neighbour. Hanson is an innocent who befriends the Benders when they move to Labette County and only begins to suspect their dark secrets much later. His perspective gives us a view on the Bender family from someone outside their twisted and dysfunctional family unit, initially a reliable viewpoint on the Benders which becomes more unreliable as the boy begins to realise the heinousness of the Benders’ crimes and the extent to which his silence makes him complicit. Elvira is the most reluctant member of the Bender family, according to herself at least – Kate regularly points out her hypocrisy, and that for all her moralising and catastrophising she is as guilty of the murders as the rest of them. However her sardonic view of Kate provides a necessary commentary on the bulk of the novel, which is told from Kate’s perspective. Kate’s voice is wonderful; Bruce perfectly captures her charm, which was a huge part of how the Benders got away with murder for so long, whilst showing the unpleasant sociopathic urges that writhe just underneath her charismatic façade. We get to see Kate’s entitlement and utter disregard for others – she sees herself as deserving of fame and fortune, regardless of whether she gets there by murder or by hoodwinking gullible townsfolk who want to talk to their dead relatives. Yet her delusions also extend to herself – she seems to fervently believe that she can run away with widower Nicholas and his sweet daughters and lead a new, sinless life with them, something all the rest of the Benders see through immediately for the impossible dream it is. The novel never loses sight of how nasty she is, but she is never less than compelling. In the fascinating Author’s Note at the end, Bruce informatively explains how much she was able to use the historical record for her story, how much she needed to make up, and how much she had to untangle from the myths and legends that sprung up around the Benders once their crimes were discovered. The novel deals with ideas around faith, belief and deception. Elvira deals in herbal and traditional medicine, something that, when the Bender family murders are discovered in Pennsylvania, leads to the whole family being accused of being witches. This ancient traditional fear is contrasted with Kate’s act as a medium, where she exploits contemporary beliefs and superstitions around spiritualism in order to make a living as a grifter, building on the training her mother gave her back in New York when the two of them had to survive on the streets before meeting William and John. Both the witch and the medium are traditionally feminine sources of magic and power, and tap into male fears of the untamed feminine. Thus, the fears around witchcraft become embroiled in fears around spiritualism and fears around how Kate uses her sexuality to get what she wants by flirting with men. In the afterword, Bruce notes how this has become entangled with the mythology around the Benders, with Kate’s imagined fate in legends about vigilantes capturing the Benders always being more vicariously violent than that of the other family members. In an era and culture when women were meant to be subservient to men and not draw attention to themselves in public, Kate flouted the societal rules, both in her openness about her sexuality and through her role as a medium, which allowed her to practice traditionally masculine roles like speaking in public and drinking alcohol through the guise of channelling spirits. Thus the mythology around the Benders seeks to punish her as much for her disregard for the rules of femininity as for her grisly murders. Bruce’s sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of Kate allows her to tackle all these complex ideas in her novel, critiquing the society of the time without making an apology for Kate’s brutal crimes. In All The Blood We Share, Bruce has created a compelling portrait of a family of serial killers that engages thoughtfully with the culture and the times that spawned them, never letting them off the hook but always asking pertinent questions about the society they briefly flourished in, and the enduring appeal of their mythology. As disturbing as it is compelling, All The Blood We Share is a grisly triumph, and one that cements Bruce’s reputation as a must-read author. All the Blood we Share is available now – order your copy HERE The post ALL THE BLOOD WE SHARE by Camilla Bruce (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

Please note this review will contain spoilers for the first book, Theft of Swords. “We either fight here and win, or die trying, because there won’t be any. thing left if we fail. This is the moment. This is the crucial point where the future of yet unborn generations will be decided either by our action or inaction. For centuries to come, people will look back at this time and rejoice at our courage or curse our weakness.” Rise of Empire by Michael J Sullivan is the second instalment in the Riyria Revelations series. Once again my edition by Orbit books contains two stories: Nyphron Rising and The Emerald Storm. Though this time around the stories do not feel as self contained, they follow on closely from each other and therefore the narrative feels much more linear. Though this book with its combined stories is well over seven hundred pages long at no point did I feel the pacing lagged, in fact Sullivan’s prose flows so smoothly the pages just flew by. Our story begins with the kingdom of Melengar on the brink of war. King Alric is in a rather sorry state with Imperialist enemies closing in on all sides. Having very little options left, his hand is forced to attempt an alliance with The Nationalists. Princess Arista, as Ambassador, sees her chance to finally prove her worth to her brother and save the kingdom and secretly journeys to negotiate this alliance with Degan Gaunt, leader of the Nationalists. Yet she does not go alone as she hires the most capable and trusted men she knows to accompany her, Hadrian and Royce. Elsewhere, our poor Thrace, who was falsely proclaimed as the Heir of Novron, is now crowned Empress Mordina. Though in truth she has very little power, she is merely a figurehead for the new Nyphron Empire led by the traitor Regent Saldur. Mentally traumatised and mute, Mordina lives but has very little life left in her, that is until a scullery maid, Amilia, by chance is appointed as her secretary. What follows from there is a quest to find the true Heir of Novron, perhaps the only one who can stop the Nyphron Church from seizing absolute control. Where the first book, Theft of Swords, was a fun adventure story, filled with banter and shenanigans, Rise of Empire is a more politically driven novel as Sullivan explores the role of leaders. Our three key players The Nyphron Church, The Nationalist rebels and King Alric make their moves and we wait nervously as the events play out. Once again, Hadrian and Royce are at the forefront. In this installment Hadrian may struggle to find a purpose in life, and Royce may dream of settling down with Gwen, but when the need arises both these men are pulled back into action. As they travel with Princess Arista they learn of the dire state the nations are facing and of an old enemy who seems to be behind it all. Their character’s more pensive demeanour immediately signifies a more serious tone throughout. An aspect I truly loved about this book was the way Sullivan explored Hadrian and Royce’s backstory by visiting both of their childhood homes. We take a brief glimpse into their lives before they met and realise how claustrophobic Hadrian had once felt continually scrutinised by his father, and the sheer poverty and loneliness Royce had grown up in. It deepened my emotional connection and in turn made me understand their motives for forming the Riyria. “Power rises to the top like cream and dominates the weak with cruelty disguised as–and often even believed to be- benevolence. When it comes to people, there is no other possibility. It’s a natural occurrence, like the weather, and you can’t control either one.” However, Rise of Empire is also where our female characters are brought further into the spotlight. Arista, who was a seemingly pampered princess, truly shines in this novel as she orchestrates the most daring plans to stop the Nyphron Church achieving their goals. Leaving her privileged life away from her castle tower opens Arista’s eyes to the hardships and injustice of the world and this blossoms her character to become more courageous, to try to do better, to use her wits to help the people she can. The magic, called the Art, is also more prominent as Arista discovers the key to unlocking her powers which was thrilling to see. In the case of Empress Modina, we see that she is not only a prisoner inside her palace, but also a prisoner inside her own mind. I felt Sullivan depicted her PTSD and depression with care, showing how harrowing experiences can leave you an empty shell. I admired Mordina’s slow progression, how awareness slowly crept in, but her lack of feeling made me nervous throughout. Our third main female character, Amilia, goes from strength to strength, not only because her responsibilities rise but also because she understands how her life hangs on a knife’s edge. I loved the way Amilia, given her poverty, isn’t a character hungry for power or privileges, her motives are merely to survive. These three characters, though all different from each other, are strong without needing to use a sword to show their strength, they are characters united in the universal goal of living in a time where men will give you very little power. Keeping with the darker tone, it becomes apparent how cruelly the Elves are being treated, how oppressed their race is and how they too suffer under the hands of tyrant leaders. Once again, Sullivan plays with old-school high fantasy elements and shapes them in compelling ways. I love prophecies, watching them unfold and seeing the myriad of ways they can be twisted and interpreted is a pure joy for me. I also love the Chosen One trope and Sullivan portrays both so well. The Protector of the Heir is revealed early on in this novel but much about the Heir himself remains a highly guarded mystery. Our meddling wizard Esrahaddon seems to hold the answers, foretelling of further significant events yet to come but we now see other figures have their own theories too. Puzzling out what is real and what could possibly be fake is what makes Sullivan’s novels so engaging. Expanding upon the world, the Art, and the political factions Sullivan weaves a web all our main players are tangled up in and we desperately hope they can make it out unscathed. Rise of Empire delivers a sequel where the plot tremendously thickens. The post RISE OF EMPIRE by Michael J. Sullivan (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

Musicians in The Cobblestone, Dublin, Ireland by Giuseppe Milo Recently I had the good fortune to listen to traditional live music at a bar in Dublin, Ireland. The fiddlers were in fine form and the whole bar was tapping along to the beat, myself included, although I didn’t recognize a single song being played. But then the leader of the band struck up a tune I was sure I knew, even though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. And suddenly and all at once, the way illumination often strikes, it came into focus — the band was playing Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah. Positive I was going crazy, I glanced around for confirmation. The older gentleman next to me leaned in. “From Ireland to Appalachia and back again,” he confirmed. This happened time and again on my trip. A street busker’s howling harmonica opening, twisty and dark, turned into a gorgeous rendition of Valerie. Rhythmic tapping on a guitar case opened a moody version of If I Go, I’m Goin. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, the Irish were taking my favorite songs and making them their own. And each time, the transformation hooked me viscerally with recognition and delight. I feel the same way, it turns out, about story retellings. There’s something inexplicably captivating about diving into a new work and recognizing an old friend beneath its surface. And clearly I’m not the only one who feels that way: Witness the success of stories like Madeline Miller’s Circe and Song of Achilles, Naomi Novik’s refreshed Rumpelstiltskin in Spinning Silver, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a retelling of David Copperfield. I’ve done a lot of thinking about retellings, in part because my latest book Darling Girl is one. For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts on what to keep in mind if you’re attempting this literary feat. Some pros and cons of doing a retelling: Depending on the story, a retelling may be considered ‘higher concept’ which can make it easier for marketing teams to get a hook into how to position the story. And news of the book can spread easily through word of mouth. The flip side of that, of course, is that readers may not take kindly to a novel that messes with a beloved tale. So it’s important to understand how a retelling can pull a reader in, and why. The pull of the familiar … There’s something comforting about sinking into a story we know well, a story we’ve heard or read so often it is a part of our bones. Especially with fairytales or novels we’ve studied in school, turning to an old but updated classic allows us to return to a period when the world felt easier, or perhaps more joyous, to recapture the magic we used to feel when someone uttered those transporting words ‘once upon a time…’ The lure of the new… At the same time, retellings also offer us the thrill of something different. There’s a certain enjoyment in thinking we know exactly what will happen, only to be surprised by a twist in the plot or a turn in a character’s development. The question then becomes, what can you as a writer bring to the familiar story that’s fresh? For me as a writer, that means starting with a story I’m passionate about as a reader and have already wondered about. How might it have ended if the main character had had a different set of circumstances to choose from? What happened before the story captured on the page to create this particular configuration of events? What might have occurred after the last page was turned and the book shut? Where is there space for me to imagine this story from another angle or point of view? For example, author Natasha Bowen uses West African mythology in her novel Skin of the Sea to retell a fairytale — The Little Mermaid — more familiarly associated with the Eurocentric tradition. In The Witch’s Heart, author Genevieve Gornichec focuses on a minor character in Norse mythology — Angrboda, one of Loki’s wives — to create a new viewpoint from which to explain and witness Ragnarok, the Norse end of days. And in the very dark retelling Snow, Glass, Apple, Neil Gaiman takes the basic tenets of the origin Snow White — a princess in a coffin who does not age — and goes somewhere so brilliant and yet so obvious you’ll wonder how you never saw it before. It’s all a matter of perspective. Once you’ve found your story, the skill rests in finding the right balance — the fulcrum between shiny new story and beloved old tale. In my opinion, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need a character-to character correlation. Rather, if you are true to the story’s essence, you can give readers just enough glimpses of the old that they can find their way through the undergrowth of the new — the same way the Irish song in the pub had just enough of the original notes for me to recognize its homage. In A Court of Thorn and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, you may have to squint to see Beauty and the Beast, but its shadows are there. Remember, too, that fairytales and myths have been around so long not just because they are entertaining, but because they tell a universal truth. Don’t stray from the path. Stay out of the woods. Kindness and hard work will be rewarded. Love conquers all. So be aware of your origin story’s center, yes, but don’t be afraid to turn it on its head, blow it up, make it your own. Hum a few bars and we’ll try and recognize it. This is your story now. Now it’s your turn. What do you think drives the current craze for retellings? What makes a great one? And what are some of your favorites? Please share in the comments below. [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

This year brings far too many good horror novels to list them all by name, but here are a few that I’m looking forward to, and that capture a wide variety of takes on the genre at a time when horror fiction is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance. Strongly represented in the following offerings are haunted buildings of various kinds, from houses to hotels to luxury apartment buildings, along with plenty of authors blending historical and horror. Other than that, it’s hard to spot trends, other than compelling narratives and innovative use of genre conventions. Enjoy! Juan Martinez, Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press, January 17) El Norte meets Barton Fink in this hotel horror. Two siblings flee from Colombia to the United States and end up at a dingy hotel in Las Vegas where strange figures lurk in the corridors and monsters feed off of the sorrow of the most vulnerable. What follows is both a brilliant horror novel and a sharp critique of capitalism and exploitation. Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless (Tor Nightfire, January 17) In this intense haunted house story, three girls spend a night in a property cursed by the hatred and violence of those who first occupied its grounds. One is trapped in the house forever, and the other two barely escape, the house’s dark powers having revealed both their vulnerabilities and hatreds to each other. Rumfitt uses body horror and the tropes of the haunted house skillfully to explore the trans experience in an England full of terfs, and Tell Me I’m Worthless contains a strong anti-fascist message for a nation beset by growing prejudices. Grady Hendrix, How to Sell a Haunted House (Berkley, January 17) I am not exaggerating when I say that Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell newsletter saved me from losing my sense of humor during the pandemic. His hilarious, metatextual horror fiction is absurdly entertaining, and his new novel, How to Sell a Haunted House, promises to skewer the tropes of hauntings while paying homage to a long history of supernaturally possessed homes. And in a country beset by widely aging housing stock, this book is probably more practical than any of us would like to admit. Johnny Compton, Spite House (Tor Nightfire, February 7) Eric Ross and his two daughters are on the run and looking to settle down somewhere where they won’t be too scrutinized. Enter the Spite House, a haunted house on a hill overlooking an abandoned orphanage, whose owner is looking for a new caretaker to help prove definitely that the house is occupied by ghosts. If Eric can stay in the house long enough to get proof of paranormal activity, he and his daughters will receive enough funds to go completely off the grid. But given the home’s propensity to rob its previous caretakers of their sanity, it’s a toss-up—will Eric find safety for his family, or has he placed them in more danger than ever before? Another great entry into the horror revival, and one of several gothic works on this list by Black authors. Stephen Graham Jones, Don’t Fear the Reaper (Saga, February 7) Stephen Graham Jones blew me away with the first in his Indian Lake trilogy, My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Don’t Fear the Reaper is, if you can believe it, even better than the first! Jade is back, now in her 20s, as a killer and a snowstorm converge on the town of Proofrock and another massacre looms. Can Jade stop the serial killer Dark Mill South before he finishes taking vengeance for 38 Lakota men killed in the 19th century? The fast-paced novel takes place over only a day and a half, and you’ll want to read it just as quickly. Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night (Hogarth, February 7) What a strange and luminous novel. Mariana Enriquez stunned with her collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, and Our Share of Night is just as fantastic (and fantastical). Beginning in Argentina in the years of the dictatorship, Our Share of Night follows a father and son on a grief-driven road trip as they mourn the loss of the woman who united them, her dangerous (and possibly immortal) family close in pursuit. A dark vampiric noir that heralds a new era in South American horror. Cherie Dimaline, VenCo (William Morrow, February 7) If you loved the third season of American Horror Story, or just rode the wave of new witch books out this past year, then VenCo is for you! A millennial Metis woman finds a tarnished silver spoon in her wall that allows her to access indigenous magic and connects her to a host of witches hiding in plain sight. Trang Thanh Tran, She Is a Haunting (Bloomsbury, February 28) So many good haunted houses out this year. This one has a fantastic setup: in She Is a Haunting, a young woman goes to live at her father’s home in Vietnam before college, only to find her family being devoured by the colonialism still hidden in the decaying estate’s walls. She Is a Haunting reads like Mexican Gothic meets Margurite Duras, for a haunting literary horror novel fully situated in its historical milieu. Also, in case the cover design didn’t warn you, there are bugs. Lots of bugs. Liselle Sambury, Delicious Monsters (Margaret H. McElderry, February 28) In the recent past, a girl who can see ghosts inherits a house that is haunted, then disappears. In the present, a girl who has a complicated relationship with her exploitative mother moves into a mansion with supposedly healing energy and a secretly sordid past. When she learns of her new home’s history, Sambury’s protagonist starts to delve into the home’s crimes against its previous residents for her investigative podcast, and hopefully bring down her mother’s self-help empire. Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio (Zando, March 7) Part of a new wave of haunted house horror that continues to expand and redefine the genre, Monstrilio is about a woman who creates a monster from a piece of her dead son’s lung, feeding it bloody sacrifices as it grows into the image of her long-gone child. Her monstrilio is loved, cared for, and wholly monstrous. But are not the monsters among us also capable (and deserving) of love? Read this if you liked Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home! Cynthia Pelayo, The Shoemaker’s Magician (Agora, March 21) In the second book of Pelayo’s Chicago Saga, an old movie palace and an icon of horror film culture may be the keys to solving a gruesome new homicide. Pelayo brings out the city’s gothic culture with loving care and plots an invigorating mystery with compelling characters. –DM Victor LaValle, Lone Women (One World, March 28) Adelaide Henry is the last of her line, burdened with a curse that she lugs across half the continental United States from warm California to freezing Montana. There, she finds friendship, companionship, and a fresh start, but will she be able to control whatever lurks in her strangely heavy steam-trunk? Lone Women is a searing and unsettling mixture of historical detail, western imagery, and terrifying twists and turns, from an author who continues to reinvent horror with every page. V. Castro, The Haunting of Alejandra (Del Rey, April 18) V. Castro’s heroine is haunted by the spirit of La Llorena—or, at least, an ancient evil that has found a way to embody a folk legend. She must go to a curandera and process her personal and generational trauma before she can even hope to be free of the demon possessing her, in what also functions as a perfect metaphor for clearing the fog of depression and seeing the societal structures and history that contribute to our present-day malaise. Andrew Sullivan, The Marigold (ECW, April 18) An evil apartment complex is the setting for this gentrification horror, complete with shoddy construction, rampant corruption, and a mold infestation that may have a mind of its own. The Marigold is a half-sold luxury apartment building; next to it are the foundations of the as-yet unbuilt Marigold II, where something monstrous lurks in the depths…A satirical take on luxury living that should evoke High Rise. Monica Brashears, House of Cotton (Flatiron, April 4) In this photography horror novel, Monica Brashears’ 19-year-old narrator is broke, working a dead-end job, and newly suffering the loss of her grandmother, the most important adult figure in her life, when she gets a strange offer from the owner of a funeral home: come model for him as he creates experiences for those who are having a hard time saying goodbye to the dead. What follows is a haunting and sly Southern Gothic with plenty of things to say about race, gender, and appropriation. Kayla Cottingham, This Delicious Death (Sourcebooks Fire, April 25) Years after a virus known as the Hollowing turns a subsection of the population into cannibals, the invention of synthetic organs have stabilized the survivors and allowed them to reintegrate into society. Four “Hollow” girls from SoCal are ready to party the summer before college and headed to a music festival in the desert, but once they arrive, they soon find out they’re not welcome, and may even be framed for murder. So yeah. Queer zombies at Burning Man. Otherwise known as the perfect set-up for a novel, or my future Halloween costume. Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy (Tor Nightfire, May 2) What if Ariel laid eggs and then her monstrous daughters laid waste to the entire kingdom? A mermaid, her daughters, and a plague doctor (the only creature spared in the massacre) go on a wintry journey in which they encounter a disturbing village that evokes the darkest of the original Grimm’s fairy tales. Khaw prose is visceral, disturbing and beautiful in equal measure. Tananarive Due, The Reformatory (Saga, June 27) Tananarive Due is one of the greatest living horror writers, and her new book blends her signature style with an exploration into a very personal trauma: Due’s great-uncle was one of many Black children harmed by the Florida reform school known as the Dozier School for Boys, and The Reformatory takes readers into the nightmare that was the school circa 1950. Sure to be as powerful as it is haunting. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate (Random House, July 18) Both of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s parents worked in radio, so perhaps that’s part of the inspiration behind this bonkers ode to sound engineering and the (literal magical) power of the human voice. Silver Nitrate features a sound editor and a has-been actor as they befriend an elderly icon from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, only to find themselves drawn into a vast conspiracy to harness the magic of the silver screen and bring an occult-obsessed Nazi back from the dead. This book has everything, and I could not recommend it enough! Isabel Canas, Vampires of El Norte (Berkley, August 29) I loved Isabel Canas’ lush, gothic debut, The Hacienda, and I’m psyched for her follow-up, set on the Texas-Mexico border during the 1840s, and featuring two childhood friends reunited in a battle against the undead. View the full article

The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new releases in nonfiction crime. * Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham, The Riders Come Out At Night (Atria) In this searing history of police violence and civil rights activism in Oakland, two longtime investigative journalists unpack the circumstances that led to Oakland’s massive amount of police shootings and other officer misconduct over the past half century. The book also goes into the many half-hearted attempts to hold officers accountable and curb their violent behaviors. Monumental and not to be missed! –MO Jeff Guinn, Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage (Simon & Schuster) As the 30th anniversary of the Waco siege approaches this February, there’s plenty to read about the subject, including Jeff Guinn’s authoritative new account of the events leading up to, including, and after the siege. Of particular fascination to me was the way Guinn takes us into the beliefs of the Branch Davidians in a way that connects them to the Great Awakening of the 1840s all the way through the growing issue of white supremacists today. –MO Jim Popkin, Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy—and the Sister She Betrayed (Hanover Square) This new account of the life and crimes of Ana Montes is timed to coincide with her January release from prison. Montes was a celebrated DIA analyst on a fast-track through the American intelligence community, when she was revealed to be a Cuban double agent. Popkin tells the story of her long-running operation, with special emphasis on her family’s connections to the FBI and American military. –DM James Bamford, Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence (Twelve) Bamford’s latest is a provocative account of massive and ongoing foreign espionage inside the U.S. Counterespionage failures take center stage, and soon the larger systemic inadequacies are exposed, revealing an unnerving look at modern America’s preparedness (or lack thereof) to deal with foreign agents hungry for the country’s technological and military secrets. –DM View the full article

By Donnaldson Brown People sometimes ask if my past experience in screenwriting has influenced how I write fiction. I mumble something vague about dialogue conveying character, or something slightly less vague about finding the beat a scene needs to move the story forward. That’s all true. Recently, though, I realized that everything I’ve written – the essays and fiction that have seen the light of day, and the stories, screenplays, and abandoned play stacked on my shelves or digitized on thumb drives huddling in my desk drawer – all started with an image, that rolled into another, of characters demanding my attention. Sometimes they drop me in the middle of whatever is captivating or troubling them. Occasionally, they’ll let me in in the beginning. At some point, it becomes clear they’ve tapped me to tell their story and they’re not going away. My husband was a painter and sculptor, and among my siblings are an architect, a designer, a photographer and a builder. In contrast, I suppose, I never considered myself visually inclined. My medium was words. Realizing that all my stories begin and evolve through very detailed visualizations of characters and the settings they inhabit, took me by surprise. For instance, one day a teenager galloping hard across the Texas chaparral on her grey mare streamed into my consciousness. I tried to ignore her, as they kept running, sweat lathering the mare’s neck. What was she running from? Where was she headed? I couldn’t abandon them – not with that bank of clouds, dark as a bruise, moving in from the west. Suddenly, a boy, about her age, lands inside a sprawling brick ranch house. The screen door slaps shut behind him. He is drenched. And angry. Who’s this? Floundering at first, I wonder are they connected? Yes. Yes, they are. How? And there you have it. We’re off to the races. Their story unfurled into Because I Loved You. Stray characters don’t often approach me like this, practically waving their arms. So, when they do, I pay attention. I’ll start a journal for them, to find their words, their private thoughts, be they petty or lofty. Journaling brings out their worries and desires, which inevitably leads to other characters in their story, and to their inner monologue, which then leads to dialogue. When Leni and Cal came to me, I didn’t think I had enough words in me to write a novel. But they led the way. I’m thankful for the characters who plant themselves before me and take root. Invariably, I fall in love with them. Giving them voice is a privilege and a duty, sometimes my reason to wake up in the morning. I listen as closely as I can, to find the best way to tell their story: what point of view to use, what tense, will there be flashbacks. Sometimes they leave breadcrumbs. Sometimes it’s just trial and error, draft after draft. I keep at it, though. Because I don’t want to let them down. * * * After thirty-six years of being a high-risk labor and delivery nurse, over twenty years of it DONNALDSON BROWN grew up riding horses on her uncles’ ranch in East Texas and in her hometown in Connecticut. Her debut novel, BECAUSE I LOVED YOU, is due out in April 2023 with She Writes Press. She is a former screenwriter and worked for several years with Robert Redford's film development company. Her spoken word pieces have been featured in The Deep Listening Institute’s Writers in Performance and Women & Identity Festivals in New York City, and in the Made in the Berkshires Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She’s a past fellow of the Community of Writers (formerly Squaw Valley Community of Writers), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Craigardan. Ms. Brown is a longtime resident of both Brooklyn, New York and western Massachusetts. A mother and former attorney, she is currently a facilitator and trainer with The Equus Effect, which offers somatic based experiential learning with horses for veterans, first responders and others struggling with PTSD. Find her online at donnaldsonbrown.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url]

This episode was recorded on Monday 23 January 2023. On Thursday, 26 January, the HarperCollins Union announced that HarperCollins has agreed to enter mediation. In this interview, I speak with UAW2110 President Olga Brudastova, and we go over the breakdown in negotiations that led to the HarperCollins Union strike, along with the demands of the union. Thank you to Barb, Bransler, Clay, Agnes, and Susan for the questions and to the Patreon community for the enthusiastic support and encouragement for this interview. Music: Purple-planet.com Listen to the podcast → Read the transcript → Here are the books we discuss in this podcast: Links? Oh yeah we have links! The HarperCollins Union on Twitter and Instagram – and their LinkTree The January 26 Press Release Donate to the Union Strike Fund The crappy PW article we mentioned United Auto Workers Chapter 2110 Scabby the Rat! (apologies – I called it Scabbers in the audio, but it’s Scabby) Why the HarperCollins Union is still on strike If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes. More ways to sponsor: Sponsor us through Patreon! (What is Patreon?) http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/podcast/patreon.png What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast. Thanks for listening! Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher. View the full article

Seven Assignments 1. Story Statement A lifetime neglect of paternal responsibilities compels an ego-driven Glenn to make peace with his three daughters, who are unaware of their "half sisters" existence until they meet after his death. Marta, his platonic partner of 20 years, agrees to carry-out the plan at his eastern Montana ranch. In exchange, she will inherit his place. In letters to each daughter, he assures that his death will provide them a life of financial freedom. In addition to the money, the middle daughter sees an opportunity to break away from her mother and their commune life; the youngest obliges in obedience to the convent that raised her and as a possible path to independence; the oldest wants the payback and seeks a final vengeance. Upon arrival, they learn that their inheritance must be earned by reading the individual journals he has created for each daughter. He structures his language to hit the deepest wounds and then soothes with the allurance of the endless skies and vast prairies. A few characters also help him execute the final closure. Coupled with these are small events that produce questions of what they really know about themselves, their relationships and him. Marta plays along with Glenn’s game, but the experiences the women share affects the execution of Glenn’s plan and alters their dreams and desires. 2. Antagonist Character Sketch Glenn is a drifter who was obsessed with possessing women by tapping into their sexual desire. It is how his daughters were conceived. ( Clarification: He is not a rapist.) As he ages, he settles down on his isolated prairie ranch where he meets Marta, and their platonic relationship guarantees his chores will be done, animals cared for, and his food prepared. For years she assists him in his quest to continue to seduce women, but now they pay him for the privilege. He finds entertainment in operating as a mystic. For Marta, the truth is known but it benefits her to support him. His use of language and landscape to retrofit any hindering negative perceptions is consistently successful. He is a clever mechanic in that way. When he realizes that he has developed an incurable illness, he uses his pending death to beckon his three illegitimate daughters to his ranch where he will retrofit their histories to fit a narrative that makes him almighty again. Their presence and cooperation includes a cash value and pays significant rewards to “honor” their accomplishments. Glenn thrives in pushing his daughters to anger, wonder and heartache; his death protects him from consequence. He pits them against each other: One is his nemesis, the other his triumph, and the last, his humility. He wants to die the most clever man. But he has underestimated the universe--and Marta. 3. Three Titles The Sorrows of My Sister Bluestem, Needle Grass, and Sorrow Beyond the Cache and the Coulee 4. Two Comparable Works in Literary Genre Jack By Marilynne Robinson Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout 5. Hookline A dying grassland farmer and his Metis companion bribe his three estranged and unrelated daughters to his isolated spread for their inheritance, but he requires tasks that challenge their perceptions of self as daughters, sisters and lovers. 6. Inner Conflict Marta, a young Metis woman, meets the antagonist,Glenn, when he finds her severely beaten in an abandoned schoolhouse near his ranch. He leaves her at a hospital but she returns and trades her freedom for his safety and security. She uses her agrarian skills and cooking talents to assure her long term survival and a chance to inherit the ranch; they both agree to a platonic relationship. For years, she supports his sexual ventures with female scientists who come to his “Mystic Ranch” to be enlightened. He loves discussing these experiences with Marta, who because of years of abuse by local women, feels no compassion for them and relishes in his conquest. He admits to her that the “Mystic Ranch” is purely a longitudinal study of women scientists and sexual vulnerability. This gives her a sense of security: he will never marry, and she will never be a victim in his games. But when the his dying bed he decides to bring his three unrelated daughters to the ranch–two of whom she didn't know existed–to see their father and collect their inheritance, she rethinks her safety and security. She is terrified of their arrival, but needs to maintain a civility to please Glen: she needs the women to sign off on the will in order for her to keep the ranch. Other Conflict: Marta employs the neighbor Joe, a popular bachelor cowhand who rents a small house on a neighboring ranch, to help her retrieve the daughters from the train station when her wagoneer refuses to start. ( She also wants support but can’t express it to him.) On the 60 minute drive, they have intimate conversations about her relationship with Glenn, the loss she feels and her future. She dreams of having a future with Joe, but it is a guarded conversation. Marta is in love, but won’t express it and would never want Glenn to know. Shealso dismisses the practicality of them ever getting together because he “drinks too much”. She wants to be his special girl. He is an easy flirt and captures the attention of Glenn’s youngest two daughters who entertain his whimsical nature like younger sisters. Glenn’s oldest is more feisty and hard: She smokes, drinks, swears. She is angry and demanding. She wants an immediate ride out of the bleakness of her father’s stead when she gets her money. Joe sees her as a character full of flaws and he comments immediately about her being a fighting fighter. Marta is consumed with jealousy. She is a fighter, but she is kind and gentle. She is adventurous, but needs the security of the ranch. She wants Joe to love her, and so long as she is in her safe abode and on her soon-to-be 60 acres, he can see who she really is and will love her. She worries about what these three women will take from her.

Pavement. Photograph by Marcus Roth, Courtesy of Matador Records. One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder. A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.” I’m accompanying the indie rock group Pavement for a thin slice of their hugely anticipated, nearly sold-out, four-month monster of a reunion tour. Founded in 1989 and nominally dead a decade later, Pavement belonged to the category of unsuccessful and confounding superstars—a band who was never really that famous, that scrutable, that glory-seeking or ambitious. None of their albums or songs ever got anywhere close to gold or platinum in the US. But they were treated as life-affirmingly, almost irritatingly influential by their big- and small-time rock contemporaries, knighted as “the finest rock band of the nineties” by Robert Christgau, and earned Pitchfork’s number one song of the nineties, back when people relatively cared about the opinions held by either Christgau or Pitchfork. They summed the epoch’s diffidence (its huge concern for “authenticity,” its allergy toward the idea of “selling-out,” et al.), were blessed and cursed with the idea that they were the vanguard of a loosely defined genre called “slacker rock,” and, for some among a population that remembers using the word hipster regularly, they are—as they were for the long-lionized English DJ John Peel—“one of the best bands in the world.” This is also a band that hasn’t written anything whatsoever together since their dissolution twenty-one years ago and whose last tour happened at the tail end of the aughts. As with most artists now granted the vague honorific of “cult band,” the enthusiasm for their reunion borders on unreasonable. Resale tour tickets in some cities were going for a ludicrous $500. Serious devotees have documented and color-coded each stop with spreadsheets that sort out setlists by album and frequency of track repetition. By the end of their North American leg, there had been a fan-made musical and a museum erected in their honor. Now, a feature-length film is purportedly in the works—one that (once again) imagines a universe in which Pavement is “the most important band in the world.” I was pre-verbal during Pavement’s heyday, so a cushion of generational remove mediates my fandom. It is unremarkable, pathological, entirely digitally-based. For those of us who grew up in a cul-de-sac with standard-speed internet—barely sentient for the twilight of the millennium, just learning how to use words like derivative in the pejorative from blogs and message boards—Pavement seemed like shorthand for a precious and preeminent disaffection that had phased out of vogue by the time that rock was no longer the biggest thing on the planet. Fans like me ached for what we imagine we missed out on, and could marvel, in a cool, touristic way, at an Arcadian moment in time in which an artist’s persona was de facto a little brambled and blurry. Now, as a fly-on-the-wall of their reunion tour—a spectacle that brings together past and present by framing Pavement as whole, imperative, immortal—two questions loom: Will it recreate the known or unknown universe as it once was? Or will it all just bum me out? DAY ONE: SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA I am walking briskly and alone along a highway bridge immediately in front of Saint Paul’s Palace Theatre, with seven hours until showtime. Pavement’s two buses stand out against the plain back entrance of the venue like two long, smooth, sleeping orcas. Most of the team is present on the band bus, either making cereal or padding around in search of the other half of a broken tambourine. There’s percussionist Bob Nastanovich, bassist Mark Ibold, and lead Stephen Malkmus, all dressed like normal adult men, which is to say in jeans, ballcaps, and interesting sneakers. The bus’s interior has a sort of upmarket beauty, with everything stained a uniform tone of peanut butter, cabinets made of a gleaming lacquered composite wood, and a hydraulic magic button in the main lounge that extends the room out four or so feet when the bus is parked. Under the glaze of the growing sun, we look like we could be on the bottom deck of a rental yacht. Scott Kannenberg, the second songwriter and guitarist, whom everyone refers to as “Spiral,” diminutive of “Spiral Stairs,” is notably absent, squeezing in a full eighteen holes of golf on a course somewhere in greater Minneapolis. (Steve West, their drummer, later tells me he wanted to caddy for him, “but Spiral wouldn’t let me get away with it. He’s got men all over this country willing to carry his golf clubs.”) Rebecca Clay Cole—the band’s overqualified keyboardist, and the only other consistent female presence on the bus—is already out too, roaming around Saint Paul in search of a museum. Bob is busily wrestling a jumbo drum of spring water onto the countertop. A pre-show morning is defined by its bumbling. “We’re in need of a sanity-type situation,” Ibold announces just as Bob leaves to hunt for a screwdriver to stab the jug with, so he and Malkmus and I hail a cab to the town’s Little Mekong district. Tour is always part-ritual and part-obligation, but it’s particularly taxing for men who’ve all crossed the threshold of fifty and have been off the road for years. They’ve had more than eighty songs to learn, some for the very first time; the venues are the largest and toniest they’ve ever played; their label’s fuss is greater; the audience is bigger by several orders of magnitude, and every member of the band can fill a notebook with fresh anecdotes on the newfound virtues of diet, hydration, and sleep. “This is definitely the most demanding tour I’ve ever been on,” says Ibold once we sit down at an empty Cambodian restaurant, eating a shrimp cake the size of a domino. “Not just musically, but psychologically.” Ibold—who has a day job as a bartender in Williamsburg and was working a shift the day before he left—is sixty. If history repeats itself, the next reunion tour will happen in 2034, when he’s seventy-two. “We have no plans to tour like the Pixies,” Malkmus says, even before I ask. This does seem like the last of things. This time around, Pavement will move athletically across the United States, then to bits of Europe, with an average of thirty-three hours of rest in between each show. I would be surprised if nobody in the band reaches a point of crisis by the time they get to the Australian stretch in a few months. “You tell yourself it’ll be more fun than doing the dishes at home,” Malkmus says. “But I’m just old, man.” I have to ask—what’s the point of all this, then? A new car? Karmic debt? Not nostalgia? “Sure, all of that,” he says, “but there’s something else in there.” Though this has been obsessively documented, I’m still taken aback by the degree to which Malkmus is very clearly the nucleus of Pavement, the band and the idea. He is its principal singer-songwriter, a blindingly good guitarist, and now shaggier and more silvery than he was in 1994 when Courtney Love called him “the Grace Kelly of rock” but retains a boyish, shitkicking quality about him. He can be remarkably feline, charmingly chilly, and has a voice that permanently suggests that he is unspecifically but thoroughly over it. He is, in many senses, responsible for granting Pavement their near-universal designation as a “slacker” band, which accounts for the general slouch of the band’s posture and reifies the archetypal Gen X attitude of rather dying than surrendering any emotional investment. “You know why I’m doing this,” he says, suddenly. “I’m really playing for the fans that are like, I just really fucking like these songs. And these guys were special to me—they made me feel safe. I’m safe here at this show.” He doesn’t look at me while saying this. “I know what you mean,” I reply, soothingly. “You know what I mean,” he sighs. By the time we get back to the Palace Theatre, the stage is ready for our opening act. A blast of organic and inorganic smells fill the building: buttered popcorn from a choke point in the lobby, a damp pigeony scent from the door that opens out onto the alley where everyone smokes, and a strong mixed waft from the green room, where a routine order has been delivered. (Their rider: Gouda, tubs of chicken salad, whiskeys and hummuses, slabs of sourdough, diet root beers, regular beers.) Like the sound of a great, muffled gong, the doors open. Two hours to go. BEFORE THE SHOW: After checking in with their dog’s caretaker, who was very sorry to let them know that their cardigan welsh corgi has been having diarrhea all day, Bob is rubbing his wife Whitney’s shoulders backstage, watching the opener perform. Rebecca is warming up her voice in a rear atrium of the basement by blowing loud raspberries.She’s been brought on tour to make the music sound “about as close to the album as we can humanly get it,” as West notes, adding that she’s “probably the only member of the band that can actually read music.” “I’ve approached this about as devotedly as a person can,” she tells me. “Even before I was approached to tour with them, I’d known that there were piano parts on, you know, a few songs, but all the old albums have these sneaky, crunchy keys and organs all over them. It’s deceptively tough jinglejangle jazz.” Spiral has returned from tee time and is now on a long and desperate quest for antacids. After ten minutes, he secures half of a lucky old roll of Tums from our tour manager Mike’s pocket. Later, he shows me a text from his wife, who’s presently somewhere in California dining with their daughter. The photo shows off their spread (pasta, white wine) and her new haircut (blonde bob). “Hott,” his text replies. When Pavement goes on, I wonder—are all old bands haunted? The show is a pilgrimage for men who look like they indulge in a good microbrew every once in a while. Those with pleading ankles and spongy knees sit; those still without stand at the front. Some audience members chuck beer cans, shriek, make out, weep. The reports that I’d heard earlier—that a couple was kicked out for having sex at a San Diego show a few days prior—seem totally conceivable, even if this was some of the least horny music on earth. “It’s so funny to see them here,” says a seated patron wearing a Guided By Voices shirt. “This is the nicest venue I’ve ever been in, and it’s like going to a cathedral and seeing a bunch of guys make a sandwich.” DAY TWO: CHICAGO “Shit,” says a voice beyond my bunk’s curtain. Then comes the clang of a dropped tambourine. Since clambering into my top bunk around 6 A.M., sticking a socked foot onto Malkmus’s pillow to hoist myself up, I’d slept like a rock until 11. After seeing the sunrise with drivers Jason and Jeff—barreling southeastward, fighting highway rumble strips—we’d all arrived and parked in front of the handsome Chicago Theatre, where the band was gearing up for two back-to-back sold-out nights. The interior of the Chicago Theatre earlyish on a Thursday looks like your usual swank venue: high-ceilinged interiors with good acoustics, baroque festoonery along the walls, and a tangle of pedals and cables littering the stage like noodles. Dozens of men and women unload the two trailers, rhythmically decanting small plastic tubs from larger plastic tubs, proving David Thomas of Pere Ubu’s claim that touring “is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other.” I watch as one tech lugs the giant, silent, theater-screen-sized video rig that the band plays in front of throughout each show, which is both a showcase for some surprisingly good juvenilia from Malkmus’s old lyric notebooks and, according to crew members, a huge logistical pain in the ass. The stage clears for soundcheck, and, now seated as the only audience member up on the prow of the balcony, I had time to study the band at their rawest. If you’ve ever listened passively to a single Pavement song, you’ll catch shambly, wooly guitarwork and jammy bass and drum patterns; if you listen closely, you’ll notice that any given Pavement song is filled with total nonsense. In 1995, the New York Times made sense of this by calling the band among “rock’s most notorious nihilists: disaffected, disenchanted, and distanced.” An especially haunting indictment came in an episode of Beavis and Butt-head from that same year, where the two cartoon morons groan at a music video for a track titled “Rattled by the Rush.” “It’s like they’re not even trying,” says Beavis. But if Beavis were to see “Rattled” as I see it practiced here before me—Ibold elated, Spiral hardly paying attention, Malkmus shredding while staring at the ceiling—he might notice that it’s not just a performance of ennui: the laziness is also creatively contrived, built into the music. Their tracks are crammed with odd voicings, alternate tunings, a constant sense of tonal ambiguity, slightly uncomfortable intervals. There’s hardly an ordinary sentence or ungenerative thought across their whole catalog. There are few vaguely placeable themes in their lyrics, and the vulnerability behind them—if you can find it at all—always seems like it comes at the end of a bong rip. (Verse 2 of “Rattled” goes: “Pants I wear so well, cross your t’s—shirt smells / Worse than your lying, caught my dad crying.) It sounds like rock, but rock rejiggered by modest, unshowy surrealists—always seemingly noncommittal but irrationally graceful in the end. After any obligatory soundchecking or set-erecting, the band and crew basically tool around for indeterminate stretches of time. I find our stalwart tour techs asleep in folding chairs—seated upright, snoring, mouths agape—just off the side of the stage not thirty minutes after soundcheck was over. West has his head down on a desk in the basement. Our tour manager Mike is on an errand: Bob has asked him to buy ping pong balls from Walgreens so that he can chuck signed ones into the audience while he plays. (Ideas for other projectiles—eggs, tennis balls, shot glasses—were dismissed.) Showtime takes forever to come until it suddenly doesn’t. OVERHEARD FROM CREW MEMBERS WHO WERE OUT OF EYESHOT: Voice 1: “We’re gonna need some tea for the team before they go on. Herbal tea is heated between 180 and 200 degrees. Black teas, you’re gonna want them between 200 and 220 degrees.” Voice 2: “No problem. But I really don’t think you know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Finally, lights go on, and the show is a goofy revelation. Spiral is tonight’s quiet hero. They play a fizzy, relatively deep cut called “Date w/Ikea,” where he takes lead—legs akimbo as in a yoga stretch—and then later leaves the stage, mid-song, mid-set. (“I had to piss,” he explains after the show.) The audience loses their mind. Fans and friends throw trucker hats emblazoned with his name onstage like bouquets. Tonight’s encore is also uncommonly touching because it includes a marriage proposal. The band jogs out after the compulsory caesura—the audience roars like white noise when they return—and Malkmus nearly ruins the whole thing by telling the crowd that “we’ve got some folks who are about to get married.” But the pageant goes smoothly: Chris, the groom-to-be, ushers his girlfriend Ramona onstage (they are thirty-four and thirty years old, respectively) and twirl around to a sweetish, woozy number called “We Dance.” At the end of the song, Chris gets down on one knee. They are, and it is, a perfectly Pavementian affair: fumbly, lightly lackadaisical, flannel-clad. She says yes. Rapt in the tender human awkwardness of it all, we migrate to a totally characterless bar across the street from the hotel where the band and the crew will stay the night. I find our drummer, Steve West, reclining with a Guinness. Bargoers flock to shake his hand, making him sit down and stand up, stand up and sit down. “I’m the most off-the-grid guy here for sure,” he says, swishing the beer around in his mouth like mouthwash. West is now a stonemason in West Virginia with the granite disposition to match. “When this thing started, all of a sudden there were a bunch of dudes from the label emailing me while I’d be out behind my house digging holes. I’m about as good at this band to-do as a head of wilted lettuce.” West has belonged to legions of bands prior to this one, but it was his work with the Silver Jews that ushered him Pavementward. The Silver Jews are something of a cousin band to Pavement—West and Malkmus played on some of their albums, Malkmus passed along the Jews’s debut to their first label, and where Pavement stands firmly on the soil of “indie rock,” the Jews err more toward country-flecked, plainspoken poetry—but their legacies have been entwined and underscored since the suicide of David Berman, the Jews’s frontman, in 2020. His life is a subject of delicate love and introspection. “Dave told Malkmus,” goes West, “‘A drummer’s replaceable—we’re all replaceable—but it’s the personalities that you can’t replace.’ So when Pavement needed a new drummer, he offered me up.” He is reverential about David, as all who knew him and didn’t know him seem to be, but his vantage is especially matchless. “Artists have always gotten used up and spat out,” West says, leaning back on his stool. “It’s just the way that all of this works. I just hope that everyone remembers how talented he was. I don’t know what took him away from us—I just know that he understood something big about this world. I’m just lucky to have known him at all.” There is a long, terrible grip of silence, then a mangled sound in his voice as he looks away from me. “I loved him,” he says, awfully. “He was my best friend.” DAY THREE: CHICAGO I wake up to a group text among Ibold, West, and their soundman, Remko Schouten. “Down for Italian beef excursion? Be in front of the hotel by 11:15.” The sandwiches from a place called Johnnie’s are pulpy potpourris of 80/20 ground beef and bell pepper and come prepared in ‘‘half-dip,”full-dip,” or austere “no dip” levels of oily jus. Digesting the whole affair alfresco, I get to know Remko, a wizardly Dutchman who’s been Pavement’s sound engineer since 1992, and is the sort of guy who’ll be working the board and time his edibles to kick in halfway through an hours-long set just to make things more interesting for himself. (This is exactly what happens later that night.) The conversation makes its way through reminiscences (“Ibold once had to fish out his shit from the tour bus toilet in 1992”) and re-evaluations (“Their first drummer, Gary—he would throw garbage into the crowd while we played, which ultimately became a problem”), but it becomes apparent how valuable his constancy is for a band always in flux—through the coming and going of members, shifting affiliations with record labels, spats and tiffs and breakups. “We run on an absurd machine,” Remko says, which is a nice précis of thirty collected years of writing on the band. “Take Bob, for instance,” he suggests wisely. “The fact that he’s here should tell you a lot about this whole thing.” Bob is a selcouth blend of audience motivator and whatever’s-in-the-percussion-room player who feels like the id of the group built on a shambolic sort of peculiarity. Most videos of the band online have at least one top-rated comment that reads something to the extent of “What is Bob’s purpose?” The night before, the newly-engaged Chris had offered an answer to the unspoken question outside of the bar. “Bob,” Chris declared, like he was sharing a commandment, “is the secret glue that keeps everything in place.” “I don’t know about that,” Bob says to me as he unloads his laundry back in the basement of the Chicago Theatre upon our return. “I really don’t have the skills to play music, I’ll be the first to tell you that. But having Rebecca here really shows you how much more vital we can be when we can actually play the songs. God knows I can’t sing. It’s really fucking embarrassing. I’ve done it for years, and I’ve seen my band wince. Even people in the crowd have covered their ears.” Not the case on our last night in Chicago. It is not the most flawless show, but the most rabid—everywhere the eye lands seems to be a fan shouting every non sequitur lyric. Like all good concerts, it’s convivial and conspiratorial, but there is an urgency in the audience tonight, a sort of disorienting attentiveness bordering on the religious. It seems everyone knows this will likely be the last time they’ll see Pavement together ever again. “Listening to this band makes me feel like the guy I was in college,” says a patron next to me, arms draped like a shawl around a woman beside him. “Sometime between then and now I became an old man, and I’m not sure how that happened.” After the encore, Ibold and Malkmus dawdle for a few perfunctory hi-byes before swiftly exiting out the back door for a bar called the Empty Bottle, where a band called Wand is playing. Wand is signed to Drag City, the Chicago-based indie label responsible for springboarding Pavement to fame. Drag City’s founder, Dan Koretzky, whom Malkmus has excitedly been calling “Papa” all evening, greets them, beaming to see friends inside the humid dive. “Didn’t think you’d make it,” he says. Ibold, gazing into the audience—which seems to gaze back at him—adjusts his glasses. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he responds. On our way in, Ibold and Malkmus are honked, gawked, shouted at. (There’s a Great show, guys! and an I love you! and then a Marry me!) When we get inside, they part the sea. Two men individually buy me a shot of Fernet when they see me passing lagers to their indie rock saints. Standing there—as a band sort of in apex and sort of in twilight, alongside a younger band who are perhaps on the road to their own sort of apex—I can only imagine that all of this is striking a note that they could’ve only dreamed of striking years ago. NEW YORK CITY: THE END My version of tour ends not on the midwestern road but back in New York, at the Pavement Museum, a four-day pop-up event in SoHo billed as a course through the band’s “real and imagined history.” It turns out the room is a shrine to Pavement in a way that feels half like an exhibition, half like pornography for ultrafans. Contemporary acts on Pavement’s current label, Matador—Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Bully and Sad13—performed Pavement’s splashier hits on a makeshift stage. Old music videos play on loop on tube TVs with built-in VCRs; lyric sheets are strewn around and encased like curios; there are communiques with record labels, lyrics on napkins, old show programs, the suit that Malkmus wore when he worked as a security guard at the Whitney Museum. I see Spiral there and ask him if it all feels a little like a mausoleum. “That’s really nice of you to say,” he replies. It’s important to note that a significant amount of the ephemera inside the room is totally fabricated. There are tour posters for lineups and dates that never existed; there are T-shirts for real past tours that were created (and knifed to look roughed-up) precisely for the museum; immortalized in a box, there is a pair of handcuffs that Malkmus brandished during a 1999 show, announcing to the audience that they symbolized “what it’s like being in a band.” The placard next to it reads “These are the original handcuffs.” They are not. They were purchased from a sex shop a few days prior. Same goes for another shadow box, encasing a lone brown toenail that allegedly once belonged to their original drummer, Gary Young (again, no: it was clipped off of the foot of the set’s art director), and for a poster of Malkmus starring in an Apple “Think Different” ad “from 1996” that he absolutely wasn’t a part of. “I have no say in this whatsoever,” said Malkmus earlier that week, of both the museum and the upcoming film. “We’ve all sent them some stuff, but I really don’t even pay attention to what these guys are doing. None of us do.” All the ersatz stuff is not subterfuge or sinisterism or deepfakery; this is–to explain the joke–a joke, in keeping with the arch “who-gives-a-shit” quality at the core of the band’s brio. A keen-to-rabid fan could plausibly discern between most bits of artifact and artifice but a casual one (which, more often than not, means a younger one) might accept them all, reasonably, as patent bits of reality. One had to admire it. All this puckish stuff made clear how little it matters what’s real: it’s Pavement not only for a generation already seduced by its apocrypha, but also for the present one, familiar with reenactments and revivals, and possessed of its own breed of absurdity. There’s probably also something to be said about how my own relationship to Pavement—private, greedy, and up until recently, comfortably unilateral —might have made the whole hall-of-mirrors scenario unfolding before me feel a little stupid and perverse. It did, but fandom demands a certain level of delusion. It is dumb and blind to real or invented ironies. To press a band into legacy and lucite before they’re gone is a pure and selfish impulse–and it makes it so they can’t ever die. Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for Bookforum, The Nation, The Washington Post, and NPR, among others. View the full article

A Lady Awakened RECOMMENDED: A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant is $2.99! This book is often recommended in terms a sex-positive heroine. However, other readers found the heroine’s view of sex to be rather unromantic. I feel like this is one of the more divisive romances; people either seem to love it or hate it. In Cecilia Grant’s emotionally rich and deeply passionate Regency romance debut, a deal with a rumored rogue turns a proper young woman into . . . A Lady Awakened. Newly widowed and desperate to protect her estate and beloved servants from her malevolent brother-in-law, Martha Russell conceives a daring plan. Or rather, a daring plan to conceive. After all, if she has an heir on the way, her future will be secured. Forsaking all she knows of propriety, Martha approaches her neighbor, a London exile with a wicked reputation, and offers a strictly business proposition: a month of illicit interludes . . . for a fee. Theophilus Mirkwood ought to be insulted. Should be appalled. But how can he resist this siren in widow’s weeds, whose offer is simply too outrageously tempting to decline? Determined she’ll get her money’s worth, Theo endeavors to awaken this shamefully neglected beauty to the pleasures of the flesh—only to find her dead set against taking any enjoyment in the scandalous bargain. Surely she can’t resist him forever. But could a lady’s sweet surrender open their hearts to the most unexpected arrival of all . . . love? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Age of Witches The Age of Witches by Louisa Morgan is $2.99! It’s also a Kindle Daily Deal. Sarah mentioned this one a previous Hide Your Wallet and was excited about the mention of Gilded Age witches. I’ve been so curious about Morgan’s books and their ability to blend historical settings, family dynamics, and magic. In Gilded Age New York, a centuries-long clash between two magical families ignites when a young witch must choose between love and loyalty, power and ambition, in this magical novel by Louisa Morgan. In 1692, Bridget Bishop was hanged as a witch. Two hundred years later, her legacy lives on in the scions of two very different lines: one dedicated to using their powers to heal and help women in need; the other, determined to grasp power for themselves by whatever means necessary. This clash will play out in the fate of Annis, a young woman in Gilded Age New York who finds herself a pawn in the family struggle for supremacy. She’ll need to claim her own power to save herself-and resist succumbing to the darkness that threatens to overcome them all. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Moon in the Palace The Moon in the Palace by Weina Dai Randel is $3.68 at Amazon, though the sale price is not offered elsewhere. This book is a RITA winner for in the Mainstream Fiction with a Central Romance category. Readers loved the setting and political intrigue, though some described some pacing issues. There is no easy path for a woman aspiring to power A concubine at the palace learns quickly that there are many ways to capture the Emperor’s attention. Many paint their faces white and style their hair attractively, hoping to lure in the One Above All with their beauty. Some present him with fantastic gifts, such as jade pendants and scrolls of calligraphy, while others rely on their knowledge of seduction to draw his interest. But young Mei knows nothing of these womanly arts, yet she will give the Emperor a gift he can never forget. Mei’s intelligence and curiosity, the same traits that make her an outcast among the other concubines, impress the Emperor. But just as she is in a position to seduce the most powerful man in China, divided loyalties split the palace in two, culminating in a perilous battle that Mei can only hope to survive. In the breakthrough first volume in the Empress of Bright Moon duology, Weina Dai Randel paints a vibrant portrait of ancient China—where love, ambition, and loyalty can spell life of death—and the woman who came to rule it all. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Three Parts Dead Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone is $2.99! This is a recommended urban fantasy and many of my friends loved it. Reviewers on Goodreads really enjoyed the badass heroine, but some felt it had “first book syndrome” with too much stuff going on to set up the plot. A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith. When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts—and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb’s slim hope of survival. Set in a phenomenally built world in which justice is a collective force bestowed on a few, craftsmen fly on lightning bolts, and gargoyles can rule cities, Three Parts Dead introduces readers to an ethical landscape in which the line between right and wrong blurs. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

Assignment 1 THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT The story is a romance, as the state of the world in the early twentieth century changes the lives of the two protagonists, bringing them together in strife and ultimately separating them in love. The primary goal of Gretel, a well-born German woman, is to find love and her place in the world after World War 1, and its after-effects destroy much of what she has known and loved. Having lost her fiancé and family’s fortune, she immigrates to rural Minnesota for a new start. William, a liveryman raised on a farm in Minnesota with a love and affinity for horses, suffers from shell shock and exposure to mustard gas from the same war. As he tries to reenter a changing world, he perceives a world full of injustice. His goal is to learn to live with the damage he has suffered from the war and reconcile the changing world around him as his health deteriorates. Assignment 2 THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT Overall, the antagonist is the tendency of human nature to prefer one’s own tribe and to consider those different as inferior. This tendency is exemplified through the excessive military nationalism of Germany but is not exclusive to them. This flaw of human nature is personified through several characters that move the plot at different stages of the story. Several antisemitic, misogynist and nationalistic villagers appear post-war and show their true colors in the pivotal year of 1923 Weimar Germany, including, to a lesser extent, Gretel’s own father and brothers. Some of these characters evolve through strife, while others don’t and are hardened in their prejudice. William’s antagonists begin with his brother Martin, a firebrand Lutheran pastor whose fundamental Christian beliefs contradict William’s more tempered belief system and doubt. Affected physically and mentally by the war, William wrestles with his memories of horror and guilt over decisions made concerning horses under his care. Upon returning to life in Minnesota, William begins to perceive the racism and prevalent prejudice in American society against blacks, native Americans, Jews, and a rising anti-German sentiment. These forces are personified in Martin, various members of the rural community, and William’s business partner. Assignment 3 CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE A Note in my Coat Pocket (my original choice) The German Immigrant Ordinary Sins Assignment 4 DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES While I worry it’s presumptuous to name All the Light You Cannot See by Anthony Doerr as a comparable novel, I think it’s valid from several perspectives. The best seller traces the paths of two protagonists from different cultures as they are affected and eventually brought together by events of World War 2. They are countered by various antagonists, formed mainly in the hands of racism and greed in German culture. The irony of the final conflict brought on by bombing by Allied forces accentuates the cultural clashes. An interesting fact is that a criticism of the book is that its portrayal is too soft on the sins of Germany. I intend to show equally even-handedness. The manuscript spends most of the pages following the two protags as their lives change from the effects of World War 1 and its aftermath. There is plenty of irony, as Gretel’s two loves of her life, both German, My second comparable is The Bohemian Flats: A Novel by Mary Relindes Ellis. It is a story about an emigrant family's journey from Germany to The Flats in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the conflicts of nationalities forced to live together. The tale is told from a hospital bed of a shell shock victim in a non-linear way, with highly vivid detail. The family eventually needs to balance anti-Germanic sentiment and guilt from the culture's sins. Assignment 5 CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT A Note in my Coat Pocket by Victor Frailing A young German woman widowed by World War One and a young German immigrant from Germany in the United States, shell shocked from fighting in that same war struggle to overcome nationalistic pride and doubt, individually and ultimately together, by love, faith, and through recognizing and rejecting the nationalism and intolerance that caused world conflict. Assignment 6 OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS Both of the protagonists will face several inner conflicts. The following are specific examples. Gretel, having been raised in a reasonably wealthy family environment, will be faced with her own pride and intolerance, trying to survive as a homeless pauper to find love in the land of her previous enemy. To understand the cause of his battle induced shell shock, William must reconcile his fundamentalist faith with the new technique of diagnostic hypnotism recommended by his doctor. His brother the Lutheran minister gave a famous sermon calling the practice satanism. A secondary conflict arises in William due to the pervading racism in Jim Crow United States in 1919. Having been raised on a rural Minnesota farm, he had little experience with black people besides a few newspaper articles. Riding the train back to Minnesota after the war, he encounters and befriends a former black soldier with whom he has much in common. A great deal of personal maturity needs to happen to replace his naivety with wisdom. Assignment 7 THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING For the better part of the book, the protagonists are in separate worlds: Gretel’s story begins in 1919 in their family’s Tudor-style home in Northern Germany, as Gretel’s brothers return from a day f looking or work singing. They are drunk. Once resplendent in Biedermeier furniture, the house is now somewhat threadbare and faded. Late afternoon light slants through the windows, illuminating flecks of meandering dust set alive as the patriarch strides in to demand an explanation. Gretel and her sister sit and mend castoff clothing piled neatly at their feet. The next scene is in the village market square of Vlotho, Ostfreisland, Germany, a small village near the North Sea. A once proud and brightly colored town square, it is now populated with a spectrum of people of a decimated society. Women are most obvious, selling scrounged goods, used furniture, and items from various home enterprises. Most of the men hang around the beer tents, drinking, singing, and arguing about politics, sometimes loudly. The conversation centers around the Armistice, Americans, Jews, the French, bankers, and whom to blame for the current state of affairs. The day is typically beautiful, with sparkling skies and the smell of beer and sausages permeating. A fancifully dressed few, enriched by the black market, prowl for innocents for prostitution and other vices. The next scene is in a hospital across the Weser River that cares for the returned and defeated soldiers, many of whom are amputees. It is a former stone monastery with damp cold individual chambers and a large central room where doctors perform surgeries with beds around the periphery. Gretel’s sister is a nurse here, and Gretel volunteers in an auxiliary society, rendering what aid she can to the women, wives, mothers, and children. Because of social mores, she is not allowed to talk to men—lots of echoes. Following scenes: Relief center in town, passenger boat to United States, Lutheran Church in Minnesota. William’s story has scenes in; The gangplank of troopship disembarking from France, wandering streets of Brooklyn, train (Lakawana Express) Chicago Central Train station, hospital at Camp Dodge, Iowa. Livery stable,

Whereas this will be a spoiler-free review, there will naturally be spoilers for book one, The Stone Knife, so if you haven’t read that, y’know, what are you even doing with your life. Xessa had always been willing to die for her people, her city, her homeland. Now she had to live for them, and she was discovering that it was much, much harder. Yep, here we go again. Anna Stephens, that serial heartbreaker, is back once again with the good stuff. Trauma and emotional heartbreak. The Jaguar Path is the second book in Stephen’s The Songs of the Drowned trilogy, and picks up two years after the tumultuous and world-rending events of the first book, The Stone Knife. Events are, for the most part, focused on the Singing City; the cloying Source, the burning training yard, the close and heavy fighting pit. It’s a much more claustrophobic read, these spaces pressing on the reader as the pressures of this world do our characters. We’ve shifted from the widespread events of the first book, to this gathering in one place as Stephens brings her players together ready for what will be the final play. But don’t worry, we’ll have plenty to face before we get there. As ever with Stephens, this is not a straight-forward story of good versus bad. The heroes against the villains. Life is not so black and white, and Stephens gleefully mirrors that in her world, forcing the reader to question well, who is the hero here? This person is obviously a villain, but wait I feel kind of sorry for them now. And this absolute tool of a person is doing something actually kind of good? And why are you doing that, you were so good in the last book!! And before you know it you’re shouting out loud at fictional characters. People change. People are moulded by their environment and their experiences, and sometimes people will break if they cannot change. Amongst many things, The Jaguar Path is certainly an exploration of that liminal space in a person’s psyche; how much am I able to bend and flex to this new world without utterly shattering and losing everything I thought I was. Some people aren’t as flexible as they think. The eponymous path of the Jaguar is the Tokob path for warriors and The Jaguar Path is very much an exploration of the myriad different ways people can walk such a path. When your home has been forcibly taken from you an destroyed, when you’ve been violently removed and separated from your loved ones, when you’ve been enslaved into an entirely different culture and faith; do you fight against that? And how? Should the path of the Jaguar be an open, wide avenue down which you march with blade in hand? The commentary on Empire and colonisation that Stephens began in The Stone Knife is continued here as we explore the after-shocks. She handles it all with incredible nuance and respect, reflecting so many different sides to the issue that you perhaps may not even had considered previously. This is a story which will really make you stop and think, and I was grateful for the opportunity to do so. The song hurts, Feather, did you know that? … Every day and night I am within this pyramid, it is a physical pain, telling me I am lesser… And yet I do my duty regardless. With love of the Singer in my heart. This is quite possibly Stephens’ most political book so far, plot-wise. There’s a great deal of politicking, power plays, backstabbing… literally. We are still very much in the realms of grimdark; there may not be as much gore and violence, but it is still present, more as an accompaniment to the main meal. Yes that is an allusion to cannibalism, yes Anna this book has cannibalism in it too. Despite that, Stephens once again immerses us in her worlds, leaving us feeling, not so much as we’re being told a story, but that we’re living in the life of these people. The Jaguar Path isn’t a tale to be told, it’s an experience. It clear that with each book under her belt, Stephens is simply going from strength to strength; I knew starting this book, that it was going to be good. Her nuanced, psychologically inspired characters, her distinct and instantly recognisable writing style and tone, her respectfully but thought-provoking commentaries. This is an author I can depend upon to be good, to not disappoint, and of course she doesn’t. If The Stone Knife was a dark and insidious read, The Jaguar Path is a heart-pounding pressure-cooker of a story of high-stakes and betrayal. Stephens is an author I will always be coming back to for more. Beautiful as blade was beautiful, as a jaguar was beautiful. As the lightening strike that lit you up with incandescence so you died bright and burning and terrible in your glory. The Jaguar Path is due for release 16th February 2023. You can pre-order your copy HERE The post THE JAGUAR PATH by Anna Stephens (BOOK REVIEW) appeared first on The Fantasy Hive. View the full article

It’s been a while since I’ve shared thoughts here, my dear Unboxers. I took a sabbatical last year for a chance to catch up on a deadline that I was horribly behind on after covid and a major family emergency. Ironically, the time off allowed me to enjoy so many more of your posts. You really are a brilliant bunch of writers. There are as many thought-provoking comments as there are posts. This community is so special and I feel lucky to be among you. But I digress. All is well here now. It’s well…except for January. January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. -Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt As I stare out at yet another gray day, I’m wishing for a snowy winter day with bright skies rather than the gloomy rain that has plagued New England this year. The dreariness, in fact, has me popping vitamin D and looking for ways to put a little more pep in my step. To self-soothe. So I started thinking about ways I self-soothe and there were a few immediate obvious answers. I bake. I read poetry. I rewatch historical flicks and romcoms. I exercise. (Shortly after writing this article, I’m going to make oatmeal cookies. If the aroma of cinnamon and sugar can’t make you feel better, nothing can.) But I also pace and doom scroll and have a glass of wine, preferably with friends, and suffer anxiety dreams. This got me thinking more deeply about those habits and my subsequent needs, and most importantly, what they’re connected to. I didn’t have to look far. If you opened my calendar, you’d see this: 7 weeks left of teaching my Editing Intensive MFA class (planning, grading, instruction time) 7 weeks to my book launch of Strangers in the Night and yet I’m watching the picket lines outside of HarperCollins continue… 10 weeks until I have to turn in revisions for my book coming next winter A running deadline of a collaboration I’m working on with my sometimes-writing wife, Hazel Gaynor There’s a lot of good stuff here for sure, but it’s still quite a lot to manage in a short period of time. Ultimately, my self-soothing underscores what my calendar tells me: I’m stressed and I’m stewing over a few things. 1.) I really want more time to put in on another full draft of the WIP before I submit the “completed” revisions, but it’ll be really tight and I’m worried it’ll make the book too thin; 2.) I’m hoping my students feel like they’re getting something out of the class and that I’m giving them enough material to challenge themselves; and 3.) the largest among them, a struggle related to being a midlist author at mid-career with a publisher on strike. Numbers are everything and if sales on the book are mediocre, this affects the possibility of another book contract which in turn affects whether or not I’m picking up more jobs to pay the bills which in turn affects how much I can be around for my kids who are extremely needy at the moment for various reasons. And now we’re at the heart of the matter. What was seemingly about weather is about a whole lot more. Beneath the self-soothing, there is “stewing,” or a struggle of sorts. A struggle related to our emotional selves. It never takes us fiction writers long to jump from ourselves to our characters. I began to think of my current protagonist and wondered, how does she self-soothe? More importantly, why? As it turns out, putting the character in the situation of needing to self-soothe is actually a great tool to create or heighten micro-tension. We can use our protagonist’s self-soothing habits to underscore something essential about who they are. These habits can reveal something about a character’s backstory, give a window into what has formed them and how it influences their means of coping with the curve balls thrown at them on the page in the story. After the second instance this self-soothing habit appears on the page, the reader gets the signal that all is not well, and in comes the tension. A few ways to show this struggle can be done through: personality traits or coping mechanims like humorous quips, lashing out to make themselves feel better, or becoming reckless with their jobs/health/lives to avoid the inevitable repetitive habits or tics like picking at scabs, rubbing a lucky stone, counting backwards in their head, singing a particular song under their breath over and over, nail biting, etc. For other examples, in my current WIP, my protagonist soothes herself by feeling for the knife that she keeps tucked under the waistband of her skirt. It’s the kind of thing that makes the reader wonder WHY? What happened to her in the past? In my second novel, my sculptress protagonist is one who experiences the world through her hands so when stressed or anxious, she rubs her pointer finger and thumb together to ground herself in a sense of reality. These very subtle aspects of layering can really enrich the narrative and make a character feel more authentic, more alive. Do you feel the same way? What does your MC do to self-soothe? Why? What does it say about them and their past? Is there some example you can think of from your own work or others, where the author created micro-tension during moments when a character is seemingly practicing self-care or self-soothing? [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards (Knopf) A genuine literary event … Others before Ellis have attempted to retool the serial narrative for the internet age. Nothing has felt quite as thrilling as Ellis’s year-long, hour-by-hour performance of The Shards … Any lingering uncertainty that its brilliance lay more in the recitation than the writing can be dispensed with. The Shards isn’t just Ellis’s strongest novel since the 90s, it’s a full-spectrum triumph, incorporating and subverting everything he’s done before and giving us, if we follow the book’s ingenious, gleefully self-aware conceit, nothing less than the Ellis origin story” –Sam Byers (The Guardian) Maria Dong, Liar, Dreamer, Thief (Grand Central Publishing) “Masterfully harrowing … A completely absorbing novel, both a terrifying whodunit thriller and a heart-wrenching drama about mental health, family, loneliness and moral relativism … This exceptional debut novel showcases relentless momentum, horrors, compassion and an unforgettable protagonist: not to be missed.” –Julia Kastner (Shelf Awareness) Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens (Ballantine) “Shroff’s debut novel is at once immensely sad—women want Geeta to help them get revenge on rapists and even a husband who threw acid on his wife’s face—but it has laugh-out-loud moments too, as the women learn to stand up to the men in their village, and Geeta forms a relationship with a good man and learns to make friends … This is a deeply human book, with women surviving and overcoming in their culture while still remaining a part of it.” –Jennie Mills (Library Journal) Kashana Cauley, The Survivalists (Soft Skull) “…[a] lethally witty debut … One might expect a novel about gun-toting, conspiracy-minded loners to lampoon its key players, but the book succeeds because Cauley appears as curious and empathetic toward the survivalists as she is toward her protagonist … Cauley’s prose comes at an accelerated clip that will at times have readers jumping back a few paragraphs to orient themselves. But devoid of pretense or judgment, her writing style reflects Aretha’s ambivalence, and the narrative’s underlying philosophical inquiries … Cauley, a former writer for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, displays an enviably versatile sense of humor…The novel is most fun when her wit bolsters the narrative’s sociopolitical underpinnings.” –Laura Warrell (New York Times Book Review) Deepti Kapoor, The Age of Vice (Riverhead) “Forget the fireworks in New York, London and Dubai. The most dazzling explosions to herald 2023 come from Deepti Kapoor’s novel Age of Vice … Swinging from the hovels to the palaces of contemporary India, this hypnotic story poses a horrible dilemma: For days, I was torn between gorging on Age of Vice or rationing out the chapters to make them last. Finally free from the book’s grip, now all I want to do is get others hooked … This is a rare case of a book bounding as high as its hype … Kapoor moves back and forth through time and up and down the social ladder. It’s a complicated but never confusing structure that unravels some mysteries while spinning new ones. Good as she is at ripping up the pages with acts of violence, she’s even more sly about pulling us into these characters’ lives.” –Ron Charles (Washington Post) Grady Hendrix, How to Sell a Haunted House (Berkley) “Grady Hendrix’s horror novels are a gateway drug to the genre, bridging the warm and cozy…with the harder stuff … By weaving violence, family trauma and humor, Hendrix creates a texture that engages the reader emotionally and viscerally … Hendrix’s humor is also on display … Gripping, wildly entertaining.” –Danielle Trussoni (New York Times Book Review) Jeff Guinn, Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage (Simon and Schuster) “Guinn was uniquely suited to write this book, having previously written about Charles Manson and Jonestown. He is steeped in the apocalyptic lore that drives many cults … Guinn does an excellent job laying out the circumstances that made Waco possible. If the reader is left wondering anything, it’s likely about the fate of the ATF and FBI decision-makers who caused the debacle in the first place. It would be fascinating to know how (or if) these figures reflected on the tragedy in the years that followed. In total, Waco is a compelling if disturbing read. Once you finish, you’re unlikely to fully trust organized religion—or the U.S. government—ever again.” –Chris Rutledge (Washington Independent Review of Books) View the full article